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Is The Fountainhead More Important than Atlas Shrugged?

By Marco den Ouden

December 16, 2023

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It may seem odd and even perverse to suggest that The Fountainhead may be a more important book than Atlas Shrugged. After all, Atlas Shrugged is widely regarded as Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, her crowning glory. Nevertheless, I think that such a case can be made. But before getting to that, let’s look at a short history of the creation of The Fountainhead.

The book is divided into four parts, each named after one of the protagonists: Peter Keating, the second hander who has a love-hate relationship with the hero; Ellsworth M. Toohey, the villain and an arch collectivist; Gail Wynand, the newspaper magnate who rose out of the slums of Hell’s Kitchen to become one of the most powerful men in New York by publishing tabloids that appealed to the lowest common denominator; and Howard Roark, the heroic figure, a man of self-made soul.

Also figuring in the story is Dominique Francon, a stunningly beautiful woman who shares Roark’s sense of life but is embittered by the thought that the world does not deserve his greatness. She believes that the world will eventually destroy Roark and so she sets out to destroy him first, so that he will be untouched by the world.

During the year and half interregnum, there were profound changes in Rand’s thinking and in the novel, as she set out to edit it considerably.

2023 marked the 80th anniversary of the publication of The Fountainhead. Shoshana Milgram, a professor of English and official biographer of Ayn Rand, notes in “The History of The Fountainhead” (in Essays on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, edited by Robert Mayhew) that towards the middle of 1940, after Rand had finished Part 1 and six chapters of Part 2, she stopped work on the manuscript, and then resumed writing two days after signing a contract with Bobbs-Merrill on December 9, 1941. During the year and half interregnum, there were profound changes in Rand’s thinking and in the novel, as she set out to edit it considerably. “Her choices—in style and in substance—indicate not only the changes she made in the characterization of Roark, but also, perhaps, some changes in herself” (Essays, 4).

In a previous essay on Ellsworth Toohey as “Fiction’s Most Diabolical Villain,” I recounted how one of those changes was Rand’s repudiation of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. She had been infatuated with Nietzsche’s work since reading him in her teens, and the first book she bought after coming to America was an English translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

While Milgram goes into considerable detail on Rand’s parting of ways with Nietzsche and how she worked to excise him from the draft of The Fountainhead, there were other significant changes in Rand’s outlook that Milgram does not cover.

The Fountainhead is her least political novel. The theme is the struggle between individualism versus collectivism, not in the political realm but in men’s souls.

Rand is usually seen as a political writer, an advocate of laissez faire capitalism as a political ideal. She is a proponent of individualism and opposed to collectivism. But The Fountainhead is her least political novel. The theme is the struggle between individualism versus collectivism, not in the political realm but in men’s souls. It is a profound psychological study of what she calls first-handers and second-handers. The working title of the book was Second Hand Lives. The second-handers are those who live through others. First-handers, whatever their level of talent, strive to be independent in their judgment, to strive for authenticity.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor described the idea of authenticity perfectly: “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me” (The Malaise of Modernity 28–29).

Indeed, this ethos is featured in Frank Sinatra’s signature song, “My Way” (written by Paul Anka). In their new book, Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics, by Roger E. Bissell and Vinay Kolhatkar, the song is quoted in its entirety as an exemplar of the ethics they are writing about. Kolhatkar notes the hope that when they have reached that “final curtain” they’ll be able to say that “I have lived a life that’s full.” He discusses some of the other lyrics but I’ll reprint the final stanza here:

For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself then he has naught

Not to say the things that he truly feels

And not the words of someone who kneels

Let the record shows I took all the blows and did it my way

That is the ethic Howard Roark lives by. A man of consummate integrity who does it his way. He took the blows, working in a quarry, two court cases against him, the years of seeing his lover married to other men, yet prevails by doing it his way, by maintaining his integrity.

Much has been written about Roark and the theme of the novel. In particular, Kurt Keefner’s essay, “The Perfecting of Howard Roark,” does a superb job chronicling the development and maturation of Roark from his first appearance at age 22 to his triumph at age 40 where “Roark is at last able to stand in full wisdom, both practical and theoretical, dedicated to the earth and connected to other human beings.  Howard Roark has become the self-perfected man.”

One of the profound changes that came over Rand’s thinking not covered by Milgram is recounted in considerable detail in Jennifer Burns’s superb biography Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. That 18 months between the early part of the draft of The Fountainhead and its completion after signing the deal with Bobbs-Merrill were not idle months for Rand. They were a busy time and marked a profound change in her political outlook.

She had stopped work on The Fountainhead in mid-1940 and resumed in December 1941. During that time Rand became more and more immersed in politics, and not just theoretical politics, but practical politics. “By 1940, her interest in politics had become all-consuming,” writes Burns (Goddess of the Market, 39). “Fired to action by the presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie, she stopped work on her novel and began volunteering full time for the New York City Willkie Club” (39).

Her attraction to Nietzsche had inspired an elitism that celebrated the creative genius while denigrating the plebes. But her politics were as yet unformed. “The Willkie campaign helped Rand crystallize the political nature of her work and resolve unarticulated tensions about American democracy and capitalism that surfaced in her during her early work on The Fountainhead.”

She had “wanted her new book to be philosophical and abstract,” Burns continues, “not rooted in historic circumstance, as was We the Living.” Burns notes that Rand was “suspicious of both democracy and capitalism” (39).

But her headlong leap into practical politics changed her views considerably. She became an American patriot. “Like any small-town booster, she touted the glories of American capitalism and individualism, voicing a newfound nationalism that celebrated the United States as a moral exemplar for the world” (39-40).

Her initial ideas for The Fountainhead had been inspired by a crassly materialistic neighbour, a social climber who told Rand, “If some people have two automobiles, I want two automobiles” (40). Rand recognized her neighbour as “someone who appeared selfish but was actually self-less,” in other words, a Peter Keating type of second-hander. “In her first notes,” Burns writes, Rand wrote, “The first purpose of the book is a defense of egoism in its real meaning, egoism as a new faith” (41). Egoism as a new morality. Years later this would be formulated as The Virtue of Selfishness.

While rejecting the Nietzschean view that “noble souls” should rule their lessors, she retained another idea of Nietzsche’s, namely the transvaluation of values, the idea of standing old, accepted morality on its head. This included a rejection of Christian morality.

Although solidly anti-Communist and anti-collectivist, Rand now had a new handle on what collectivism actually means, “motivation by the values of others versus your own independence” (Ayn Rand, from the Barbara Branden interviews,11, quoted in Burns, 43).

Rand had become increasingly political with her reading of H.L. Mencken, Isabel Paterson and Albert J. Nock, among others. She developed a revulsion towards Roosevelt’s New Deal, writing a pointed attack on Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court in 1937.

But it was the Willkie campaign that marked a significant shift in her attitude towards American democracy and the common man, famously characterized as the booboisie by Mencken. Willkie was chairman of Commonwealth and Southern, a private utility fighting a rearguard action against Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority’s attempt to nationalize it. “It was the kind of government assault on private industry that made Rand’s blood boil,” writes Burns (53). Now Willkie was the Republican presidential hopeful.

Though Willkie carried some baggage, including being a former Democrat, Rand was inspired by his defense of capitalism. “I’m in business and proud of it,” Willkie declared. “Nobody can make me soft-peddle any fact in my business career. After all, business is our way of life, our achievement, our glory” (Quoted in Burns, 54). Rand was “convinced for the first time that domestic politics truly mattered.”

Starting as a volunteer typist, she soon was heading a new “intellectual ammunition department” (55)—a title, incidentally, that she later gave to a regular feature in her newsletter. Characteristically, Rand favored going for the jugular, attacking Roosevelt’s “negative qualities,” and was disgusted by the Willkie campaign’s favored practice of emphasizing their candidate’s positive qualities.

A big shift in her attitude towards the general public came as she answered questions from the audience following Willkie newsreels at theaters. “I was a marvelous propagandist,” she told Barbara Branden in an interview.

“Her coat emblazoned with Willkie campaign buttons, she joined the ranks of the city’s soap box preachers,” writes Burns (56). “On promising street corners she would begin an anti-Roosevelt, pro-Willkie diatribe, quickly drawing crowds.”

Contempt for the masses peppered her earlier fiction.

“Rand had been suspicious of American democracy,” notes Burns. In her journal notes, she had written, in Nietzschean fashion, that “the state should be ‘a means for the convenience of the higher sort of man’” (Journals, 73, quoted in Burns, 56) Contempt for the masses peppered her earlier fiction. But “now she found herself impressed by the questions her working-class audience asked and their responsiveness to her capitalist message.” Burns quotes Rand to the effect that her experience “supported my impression of the common man , that they really were much better to deal with than the office and the Madison Avenue Republicans.” (Barbara Branden interviews, 14, quoted in Burns, 56).

After Willkie’s defeat she remained in the political fray until The Fountainhead was sold. She “began to see herself as as an activist, not just a writer,” writes Burns. (57) She wanted, in fact, to start her own political organization. She envisioned “a new organization. … national in scope but primarily educational in nature” (58)” She wrote an essay, “To All Innocent Fifth Columnists,” warning that “totalitarian dictatorship in America was only a matter of time, and she blamed apathetic and ignorant citizens, the so-called ‘fifth column’” (59). Ignoring politics, she averred, was “a grave mistake.” Recognizing the irony of her plan, she wrote in her Journals that she was proposing “an organization against organization … to defend us all from the coming compulsory organization which will swallow all of society.” Personal neutrality was not an option.

Rand got financial and intellectual backers for her proposal and in early 1941 she wrote her “Manifesto of Individualism.” Knocking off this thirty-two-page tract at white heat over one weekend, it was to “present the whole groundwork of our ‘Party Line’ and be a basic document, such as the Communist Manifesto was on the other side” (letter to Channing Pollock, quoted in Burns, 61). Rand’s activism and ambitions during this period were a forerunner of the later Nathaniel Branden Institute which carried out these very goals in the 1960s.

She conceived of society as two different pairs of opposites, the Political Sphere and the Creative Sphere. More psychological was the contrast of the Active Man and the Passive Man. The latter were “variations on the concepts of the creator and the second-hander that underlay Rand’s developing novel” (62). The passive man “was not necessarily a member of the working classes … or the ‘so-called downtrodden.’” In fact Rand believed that collectivists were primarily “second-generation millionaires and the Intellectuals” (62).

Burns summarizes this shift in Rand’s thinking thus: “Before Rand had spoken only of the superior man and his contributions to society, showing little interest in distinguishing members of the faceless mob below. Now, without losing contempt for ‘the lowest elements’ (which remained undefined), she had allotted a new role to the vast American middle classes” (62–63). Her manifesto “throbbed with a newfound love and respect for America” (63).

She gained a new understanding of capitalism, inspired in part by Carl Snyder’s book Capitalism the Creator. Rand concluded her manifesto with her observation that “we have never had a pure capitalist system,” so we should not blame the problems of a mixed economy on capitalism. Capitalism, she declared, “is the noblest, cleanest and most idealistic system of all. We, its defenders, are the true Liberals and Humanitarians” (quoted in Burns, 65). She concluded with a rousing challenge, a counterpoint to Marx’s famous dictum: “INDIVIDUALISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!”

Rand’s new enthusiasm for politics and her changing view of the common man found their way into The Fountainhead. Her rewrites changed the tenor of the novel. While still predominantly a novel about individualism versus collectivism in men’s souls, it now had an overt political message as well. But Rand’s Nietzschean elitism had been subdued. She no longer had contempt for the average citizen, the broad middle class.

In his book, Nietzsche and the Nazis, Stephen R.C. Hicks notes that Nietzsche was no individualist. He quotes him to the effect that “My philosophy aims at ordering of rank not at an individualistic morality.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 287, quoted in Stephen R.C. Hicks, Nietzsche and the Nazis, 89) But, Hicks adds, “It is hard to see as an individualist anyone who sees no value in the lives of the vast majority of individuals.”

In The Fountainhead, this new-found affection for those average men takes a psychological turn. Mike Donnigan is one such average man who becomes a fast friend of Roark’s. What is important is not his achievements which are modest, but his character or soul, which is great. In selecting the jury for the Cortlandt trial, Roark selects the panel by their character, not their accomplishments. His jury included “a truck driver, a bricklayer, an electrician, a gardener and three factory workers” (The Fountainhead, 707). “Roark had chosen the hardest faces.”

Rand’s discovery that the most likely collectivists were the “second-generation millionaires and the Intellectuals” is reflected throughout the novel. Toohey is a front-rank intellectual. And during his university days, Rand notes that, as an influencer, Toohey “did not have much success among the poor boys working their way through college. He acquired a sizeable following among the young heirs, the second and third generation millionaires” (308).

There is a short documentary included with The Fountainhead movie DVD on The Making of The Fountainhead. It notes that in test screenings of the movie, it was the blue-collar crowd, the Mike Donnigans of the world, who were most enthusiastic about the film, much to Ayn Rand’s delight. It was the cloistered elites who disdained the film.

Despite the politicization of The Fountainhead, it is the psychological aspects that predominate.

Despite the politicization of The Fountainhead, it is the psychological aspects that predominate.

The first book of Rand’s I read was Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in the summer of 1969. It blew me away, but it also blinded me to some of the key aspects of Rand’s philosophy. I focused, as so many libertarians do, on the ethics and politics. Certainly I was aware of her metaphysics and epistemology but I was oblivious to the underlying psychology that forms the basis of The Fountainhead, which I did not get around to reading until my third year as a newly minted Objectivist wannabe.

It was only later that I came to realize that maybe I had missed something very important. One of these realizations came about because of one of my daughter’s high school teachers. She was a very innovative teacher, and her social studies course took them out on many field trips. But there was a strong left-wing tinge to the course materials, so I wrote her a letter telling her she should take a more balanced approach to her teaching. That capitalism wasn’t a dirty word. And that she should read Atlas Shrugged.

A few years later, after my daughter had graduated, I got an email from this teacher asking if I would like to talk to her class about libertarianism. I accepted. She told me that Atlas Shrugged changed her life. It gave her the inspiration to go back to university for a master’s degree. It let her know she could pursue her dreams, that she shouldn’t let herself be held back.

The other realization came from a book I recently reviewed for Quillette, Andrew Koppelman’s Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was Corrupted by Greed and Delusion. The book had garnered praise for its relatively fair-minded treatment of the subject. Rand was among the people he critiqued. But his take on Rand was mixed. Parts of her writings he despised, but other parts he saw as very valuable. Koppelman, while a critic of some aspects of libertarianism, is no anti-capitalist. He is a fan of Hayek who influenced him greatly. Commenting on Atlas Shrugged. he writes that her description of the launch of the John Galt Line is “infectious joy in the power of human ingenuity. The passage is genuinely inspiring, an eloquent panegyric to capitalist achievement” (146).

But particularly relevant for me was the following on The Fountainhead: “The most attractive aspiration in Rand is the independence of judgment, and faith in oneself, displayed by Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead. The book has surely helped many young people with its message that they should pursue their own deepest aspirations, and not care about impressing others” (149).

This is at the core of The Fountainhead’s continuing appeal. In the introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition, Rand writes that “the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead (is) man-worship” (xi). She elaborates: “The man-worshippers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it” (xii).

With the opportunity to explain it, she brings back the Nietzsche quote that had originally headed the book, “The noble soul has reverence for itself.”

She continues with the thought that “this is the view with which—in various degrees of longing, wistfulness, passion and agonized confusion—the best of mankind’s youth start out in life … It is a sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one’s life is important, that great achievements are within one’s capacity, and that great things lie ahead” (xiii). This is the sense that my daughter’s teacher saw and that Koppelman saw.

All too often, this Spirit of Youth is lost. “Some give it up at the first touch of pressure,” Rand writes. “Some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing how or when they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one’s mind; security of abandoning one’s values; practicality of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed” (Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead 25th Anniversary Edition hardcover, xiii).

In his essay “The Fountainhead and the Spirit of Youth” (in Mayhew’s Essays), B. John Bayer elaborates on Roark as an exemplar of the spirit of youth. Three hallmarks of this spirit were  noted by Ayn Rand in a 1969 essay on dissident Russian youth protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia following the Prague Spring. They are idealism, independence, and goodwill. This same spirit of youth manifested in the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, China in 1989.

Bayer argues that Roark exhibited all three of these hallmarks. For Ayn Rand, idealism means “taking ideas seriously” or “intending to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true” (Ayn Rand, “Philosophical Detection” in Philosophy: Who Needs It, 16, quoted by Bayer in Essays, 229). Roark’s idealism manifests itself throughout the novel—in his conversation with the Dean, in his willingness to forgo commissions rather than compromise the integrity of his work, and even in his act of blowing up Cortlandt Homes.

Roark’s independence, suggests Bayer, is clear from his renouncing “social approval ‘by never wanting it’ in the first place” (231). Keating, on the other hand, craves approval. His goal is “to be admired and envied by others” (232). Even the so-called non-conformists in the novel, Toohey’s ratpack of social misfits like Lois Cook, Ike the Genius, or Gus Webb, “since they define their standards in opposition to society’s, it is society that sets the terms” (232) They are not true individualists.

And throughout the novel, Roark projects goodwill. This is especially evident with the boy on the bicycle whom Roark encounters outside Monadnock Valley. Bayer describes the scene as “Ayn Rand’s entire view of youth in microcosm” (234).

The Fountainhead is a psychological study, not an overtly political one, though there are a great many lines that are eloquent precursors to the more explicit political philosophy of Atlas Shrugged. There are even lines that are a precursor to Nathaniel Branden’s later writings on psychology, the visibility principle being one of them.

But many people who are inspired by Rand’s ethics and politics unfortunately share Dominique’s malevolent universe premise. They are pessimistic about the world and its prospects.

But many people who are inspired by Rand’s ethics and politics unfortunately share Dominique’s malevolent universe premise. They are pessimistic about the world and its prospects. And they often display an underlying anger and hostility towards the world.

This is a far cry from Roark’s calm and detached spirit. Roark displays a sense of being at peace with the world. Yes, he will fight for his values. But he will not let the world destroy his inner sense of peace. He chooses his friends and ignores the rest. They are in his peripheral vision at best, and they do not take center stage or dominate his being. The best example of this, and my favorite quote from the novel, is when he encounters Toohey on the street.

Toohey, despite his alleged self-abnegation, wants recognition. He wants to be acknowledged as a formidable opponent. An acknowledgment that Roark hates him.

“Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.”

“But I don’t think of you” (401).

When I launched my blog, The Jolly Libertarian, it was after seeing so much anger and hostility in libertarians I met online. I wrote in my introduction, “All too often in the libertarian movement, whether it be in Facebook posts or on their own blogs and websites, I run into angry libertarians. Libertarians consumed by hate for the government, the police and the status quo. Libertarians who display a core emotion of bitterness, anger and unhappiness.”

On the other hand, I wrote, “Jolly libertarians are basically happy people. People who pursue careers that they enjoy and give them fulfillment. Who marry and have children and enjoy the companionship of family. People who have a life outside of libertarianism. People who can accommodate non-libertarians into their life without anger and hostility. People for whom libertarianism and politics in general is a secondary and not a primary motivation.”

It’s the difference between a malevolent universe premise and a benevolent universe premise.

I see politics the same way Roark sees Toohey. “For the most part, government is an annoying fly buzzing in the background. And it has the same significance as a fly” (The Jolly Libertarian). One is reminded of the Nietzsche quote “No longer raise your arm against them! They are innumerable, and it is not your fate to be a fly-swat” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 79).

People who are confident in themselves, people who “pursue their own deepest aspiration, and (do) not care about impressing others” in Koppelman’s words (149), are not cowed by government. And in their daily lives, for the most part, they do not think about politics. They pursue their own interests.

In a world of self-actualizing people, tyranny is an impossibility. It’s a question of putting the horse before the cart. The horse is the self-confident individual pursuing his goals. The cart is the baggage of politics. Teach people to value themselves, to value their integrity, to value self-confidence, to value the achievement of their highest aspirations, and the rest will follow. The Fountainhead is the horse. Atlas Shrugged is the cart.

Jennifer Burns concurs. In her final chapter on Ayn Rand’s legacy she writes that once you strip away the politics, “what remains of Rand … is a basic ethical truth that continues to attract admirers of every political persuasion. Be true to yourself, Rand’s books teach, sounding a resonant note with the power to reshape lives” (285).

Burns quotes from an enthusiastic 1965 fan letter from a forty-three-year-old man with a seventh-grade education, “a twist of fate that left him consumed with anger, confusion, and self-hatred.” He had just read The Virtue of Selfishness. “Everything I have read and learned fell into place. just like that. BANG! AND … just like that … YOU … gave ME … back to MYSELF!!” (ellipses in original)

“It is this enthusiastic response that has made Rand’s prodigious novels, dismissed uniformly by literary critics, into modern classics,” Burns continues. The aspects of Nietzsche Rand admired, “the sense of exaltation, worship, reverence, and a sense of the sacred” were primal. “For all her emphasis on reason it is the emotional and psychological sides of her novels that makes them timeless. Reports of Ayn Rand’s death are greatly exaggerated” (286).

Amen to that!
 

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